Share the News — A.W. Tozer

The Necessity of a Power-Endued Witness

But Christian witness without power, I say, it's not only inadequate, but it can be altogether injurious if we don't look out. There must be a power-endued witness, and nothing can stand before a power-endued witness.

Christians Must Take Personal Responsibility for Witnessing

You see, in the day in which we live, here's the way we do it. Christians lie around and give no witness at all, but they are willing to pay certain gifted men to witness for them. That's why we have evangelists and men of big name who can get crowds to hear them.

They give the witness that we should be giving. They should be giving theirs, too, but the individual should be giving theirs. But instead of letting an evangelist supplement the witness of the individual Christian, the individual Christian foots the bill and pays and lets the other man be his proxy.

The Church Cannot Outsource Its Witness

And that's the trouble in the world now. A church will sit around and give no witness at all for a generation, but call a man in once a year to give their witness for them, and usually he gives it to the same ones who have heard it before.

Or we'll send a man out, a widely known man like Billy Graham or Billy Sunday or some other man known around the world, and they go giving the witness that we should be giving. And if the individuals were giving a witness, their witness would be more powerful.

The Collective Power of Spirit-Empowered Christians

And there would be more Christians everywhere because a thousand individuals giving their witness in the Holy Ghost are more powerful under God in the winning of converts than any evangelist that ever lived from St. Paul to the present hour.

The Evangelist’s Place and the Church’s Calling

This is not to speak against the evangelists or to slight them in any way. It is to say they have their place in the church and the whole pattern of God, but the church should be the witness. This church, you, you who love our Lord, should give the witness.

A Sleeping Church and the Lost World

A man writes me a letter on the letterhead of a company in the city of Glendale, California, and he says, Dear Joseph, Orthodox evangelical Christianity would say I belong to a fine church. And then he names it, but I won't.

He says, Yet ninety-five percent of the members of my church, ninety-five percent of its team goes up to blow the whistle. Committees, suppers, services, special speakers, chants, and with these activities, the church membership and the finances keeping up and all, pastors and officers as well as members seem happy and sleepy.

The Church Sitting Out the War

In a church of some five hundred members, it's difficult to get twenty out once a month to do calling. The church is out of joint with the army of the Lord, he says, quite content to sit in the pool or to spend most of its efforts in dress rehearsal or in polishing its weapons or attending its social functions within the fort.

And the aggressiveness is left to the Seventh Adventist, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Mormons. And yet we often speak of this poor, lost, dying world. I wrote to that man and said, Please write me an article and say the same thing.

I want to publish it. But he wrote back and said he couldn't possibly write, he was no writer. But I think he said something there, Brother. I think he said something, that we, the soldiers of the Lord, spend most of our time sitting out the war.

We're sitting out the war. The fight is on and we're taking our girl to the function one night and going to the men's group the next night and to a camp week in the summer and off here somewhere. We're praying instead of fighting.

Witnessing What God Has Done

We are sitting about instead of getting up and being witnesses. You are witnesses, he said, you are to be witnesses unto me. A witness says, I saw and I heard, and here's what God did for me, and this has happened to me.